State Levies $117,000 Fine Against Water District

State water officials fined the Las Virgenes Municipal Water District $117,000 Wednesday for illegally discharging 60 million gallons of treated sewer water into Malibu Creek during October--discharges the district had warned were unavoidable.

The penalty followed a $70,000 fine imposed when the district illegally released 19.2 million gallons of effluent from its Tapia Plant in September.

The state took action after Las Virgenes officials knowingly violated restrictions of a new permit meant to protect the Malibu Lagoon habitat by prohibiting releases of treated water into the creek from May to November.

After the earlier fine, the district warned state officials it would be forced to continue disobeying the restrictions due to cool, wet weather earlier this fall and overburdened reservoirs and storage tanks.

The same violations could also occur next summer, district officials said, unless the state allows them time to determine how to comply with the permit, which was approved in April.

The California Regional Water Quality Control Board has scheduled a Dec. 14 hearing on the illegal discharges and the conditions of the permit, which is designed to protect endangered species in Malibu Lagoon and limit the amount of human waste entering the ocean.

During that hearing, to be held at the U.S. Court of Appeals in Pasadena, Las Virgenes officials plan to argue it is impossible to guarantee compliance with the permit until they can find acceptable alternatives to discharging into the creek during the summer and fall.

To comply with the permit, the district--which handles more than 10 million gallons of waste water per day for roughly 64,000 residents in western Los Angeles County--must develop such alternatives by next November.

“We are being required by [the state] to present alternatives to discharging water by November 1999 yet are supposed to stay out of the creek until then,” complained Norm Buehring, director of resource conservation for the Las Virgenes district. “We want to share with the board the difficulty of those two requirements, which don’t appear to be complementary to one another.”

Buehring said compliance this year became difficult in early September, when light rainfall filled the reservoirs and storage tanks at the Tapia Plant and lowered the demand for waste water usually purchased by agencies that irrigate parks, schools, golf courses and landfills. Cool weather in October kept that demand low, Buehring added.

State water officials and environmentalists, however, chided the district Wednesday for being unprepared, arguing that Las Virgenes officials had known about efforts to restrict discharges into Malibu Creek since 1994.

“For four years they’ve known they are supposed to be working toward this process,” said Bob Purvey, an environmentalist with the Surfrider Foundation who during a 1995 Malibu Lagoon conference helped draft alternatives for Las Virgenes to discharging into the creek. “That they claim they are only now aware they are supposed to be doing this is false.”

Among those draft alternatives are lowering district prices for recycled water and piping waste water free of charge to irrigate fields in Oxnard, Purvey said.

Buehring said the district is now pursuing one alternative: another permit that would allow it to rechannel some of its waste water to the Los Angeles River.